One of the Museum of Liverpool’s latest acquisitions into the Regional Archaeology Collection is the amazing Malpas Hoard. This collection of coins, buried around AD50 has been acquired jointly with Congleton Museum as part of the Cheshire Hoards Project, supported by the National Lottery through the Heritage Lottery Fund.

The hoard consists of seven Iron Age coins, of a denomination called staters, and 28 Roman coins of a denomination called denarii.

The staters, which were struck in the two or three decades preceding the Roman invasion of Britain in AD43, are among over 40,000 examples of Iron Age coins found across the country. These provide tantalising evidence about the late prehistoric period in this country and track the transfer from an exchange economy to a monetised society.

The discovery of seven staters near Malpas in Cheshire by a metal detectorist is an exciting find. While hoards containing a mix of Iron Age and Roman coins are not unusual, they are rare in this region.

University of Liverpool research students Nikki George and Morgan Murphy analyse the coins in the SEM-EDS

The Iron Age coinage is loosely based on Classical Greek coinage, which often depicted horses. A highly stylised horse is shown on each of the staters.

The mixture of coins in this hoard are an interesting group: the staters are of two types: three are marked EISV, probably after an individual named Eisu or whose name was shortened to Eisu. In this period before written records there is no other evidence about this person. The other four other staters bear the letters VEP CORF, which is again probably all or part of a personal name.

The most common findspots for these two types lead archaeologists to associate the EISV coins with the Dobunni tribe in Gloucestershire and region and the VEP CORF coins with the Corieltauvi in Lincolnshire and region. These coins have therefore travelled some distance before being deposited in Cheshire.

Currently these two groups of Iron Age coins are undergoing analysis in the new Elizabeth Slater Archaeology Research laboratories at the University of Liverpool to better understand their metallurgy. These staters are described as ‘gold’, as some of the metal content of such coins is usually gold, the rest made up with a mixture of silver and copper. We are interested to know whether there is any discernible difference between the metal alloys of the coins bearing the inscription EISV and VEP CORF respectively.

Analysis by scanning electron microscope with energy dispersive analyser (SEM-EDS) is able to reveal that the three different metals used in the coins didn’t mix completely in production, and there are some areas with a very high concentration of gold/silver which hasn’t mixed with the copper. The initial analysis suggests that the coins contain around 20% gold, 10% silver and 70% copper. The two groups of coins, defined by the inscriptions ‘VEP CORF’ and ‘EISV’, show very similar compositions, which raises questions about the methods of production, any possible standardisation among the people who were making them, and the original source of the metals. Research is continuing in the Department of Archaeology, Classics and Egyptology at the University of Liverpool.

On the 27th of August Anja Rohde, a PhD student from the University of Nottingham researching the coins of the Norman Conquest (11th century AD), visited our stores to examine the coins of William the Conqueror and his son William Rufus. Anja is an experienced museum professional having previously worked in Derby museums as a collections officer and shared the Finds Liaison Officer for Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire. She is currently visiting various museums across Britain to examine the coins which they hold in their collections, this research is funded by AHRC Midlands-3-Cities partnership. Find out why Anja is interested in the coins of that era:

“The coins of the Norman Conquest period are all silver pennies, and they are fascinating! On one face they have a portrait of the king, with his name and titles around the edge, and on the other face they have a cross, to represent Christianity, and they state the town where they were made and the name of the official who was responsible for their manufacture.

The coins can therefore reveal things about how the king wanted to be depicted to his subjects, how the process of producing money for the kingdom was organised, who the men responsible for minting coins were and how the economy of the country was running at the time of the Norman Conquest.

I am looking for differences in the way the minting system was organised in different regions of the country, and whether this changed over the first 35 years after the Norman Conquest. I also want to see if I can find out more about the individual mint officials. I therefore weighed, measured and photographed each of the coins in the Liverpool collection, and examined them closely, so I can compare them to the coins in other museum collections.

The Liverpool collection contains about 50 pennies of the two kings William. There are pennies made in various towns, such as Colchester, Ipswich, London, Winchester and Wallingford, but over two thirds of them were made in York. York was an important place in the 11th century, and is one of the towns I am particularly focusing on in my project. I will therefore be interested to see what the coins from the Liverpool collection will tell me about money and society in York in the years just after the Normans invaded.”

As part of our numismatics collections we have around 150 early British, including Anglo-Saxon and Viking, items.

Left hand coin: “LIV William I sword” (53.114.1778)This coin shows William the Conqueror wearing a crown and holding a sword to show that he is a strong leader.Central coin: “LIV William I bonnet” (53.114.1754)This portrait shows William the Conqueror wearing a particularly fancy crown. It has been given the nickname of the ‘bonnet coinage’!Right hand coin: “LIV William I reverse” (53.114.1765)This is the back of one of William the Conqueror’s coins. The inscription reads VLFCETEL ON EO, which means “Ulfcetel at Eoferwic”. Eoferwic was the medieval name for York, so this coin was made in York, by a man named Ulfcetel.

“To Keats it was a ‘season of mists and mellow fruitfulness’, but for us so far it has been a season of uncommon warmth followed by freak hailstorms! With the the various harvest festivals fast approaching here is an image of agricultural bounty to celebrate the spirit of Autumn. This is an eighteenth century trade token; these coin-like objects, almost always of copper, were circulated locally to plug the gaps in small denominations not available in large amounts from the Royal Mint. Their designs usually reflected the economy of the area or the business of the issuer, and as this example is from Herefordshire the bull could very well be of that particular meat breed.”